Thadeus Greenson wrote a good piece in last week’s North Coast Journal about the skewed panel assembled to vet candidates hoping to replace Kevin Robinson, who retired recently, as County Public Defender. The panel consisted of the County’s three top law enforcement officers: District Attorney Maggie Flemming, Under-Sheriff, soon to be Acting Sheriff, William Honsel and Probation Chief, Bill Damiano, as well as two other county bureaucrats. Law enforcement officers clearly dominated the panel. Notably absent from the panel: retired Public Defender Kevin Robinson, or anyone with experience as a defense attorney.

Letting law enforcement officers choose the Public Defender is like letting a boxer decide who he wants to fight for the big-money title fight. Who would you rather fight, Mike Tyson, or Michael Moore?

The Public Defender is a sworn enemy of law enforcement. A good Public Defender knocks down a DA’s conviction rate. Maggie Flemming campaigned on her conviction rate, and will likely have to do so again.

A good Public Defender exposes lying cops, police corruption and abuse. Here’s an example of how a good defense attorney keeps cops honest. Recently, a murder suspect in a SoHum shooting, hired himself a pretty good lawyer. The lawyer discovered a discrepancy in the Sheriff’s Deputy’s report. Apparently the Deputy, Deputy Swithenbank, confiscated some pills from the suspect. The Deputy made no mention of the pills in his report, nor did he turn them in as evidence. Instead, the pills ended up in Deputy Swithenbank’s private locker.

Whether or not his client is guilty, this attorney’s good work uncovered a problem within our Sheriff’s department that we deserve to know about. It is the Public Defender’s job to make law enforcement look bad, so of course, law enforcement wants the weakest possible Public Defender, which is why they were the wrong people to recommend one.

Several people have now come forward to question, or outright condemn this whole process of allowing County law enforcement to pick the new Public Defender. To placate this controversy, 2nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell pointed out that, she, along with the rest of the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, not the skewed panel, made the decision to hire the guy with the sketchy resume, who’s little experience in the field seems clouded by poor judgment and laziness. At least that’s the impression I get of our new Public Defender, David Marcus, from the dirt Thadeus Greenson was able to dig up on him.

The fact that the Board of Supervisors made the decision to hire Marcus does not make me, nor should it make you, feel any better about it. Clearly, the Board of Supervisors wants a weak Public Defender. The Board of Supervisors have demonstrated their contempt for justice, civil rights and human rights again and again. They’ve concocted new, unconstitutional, laws to criminalize poverty, and outlaw sleep, and they’ve made harassing the poor and homeless a top priority.

Our current Board of Supervisors works for the greedy cadre of drug dealers and real estate moguls who financed their campaigns. Those people don’t care about justice either. They don’t even care about reality. All they care about is money, and in their world, looking poor is crime enough. These puppet-masters want the County to focus on projecting that appearance of bland, harmonious prosperity that investors find so appealing, and they don’t really care if cops rape homeless women or if the DA railroads innocent defendants just to enhance her statistics.

This decision is just the latest attack on the civil and human rights of Humboldt County’s most vulnerable. We must assume that the Board of Supervisors went looking for a weak Public Defender, since the Board of Supes passed over two experienced, well-qualified candidates from within our current Public Defender’s office, and instead opted for an undistinguished, out-of-state candidate with very little experience. This decision will likely demoralize the Public Defender’s office.

Becoming a Public Defender is probably the most noble thing an attorney can do with his education. The workload is overwhelming and the pay is low, by attorney’s standards. The people who choose to make their career in the Public Defender’s office, do it because they believe, passionately, in justice for all. The injustice of this decision will not be lost on them. It would not surprise me if many of the excellent defense attorneys now working in our Public Defender’s office, decided to look for other avenues to further their careers.

The Public Defender is the poor defendant’s only advocate against the entire law enforcement bureaucracy. A good Public Defender keeps cops honest and makes the DA do their job. A weak Public Defender denies justice to the whole community because they let cops cut corners, and let the DA railroad innocent poor people to pump up their stats. A weak Public Defender weakens civil rights and undermines public trust.

Once again, by intentionally choosing a weak Public Defender, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors has demonstrated the contempt for justice, human rights and civil rights that has darkened this County’s history for so long.

Last week I wrote about how our failure to address the housing crisis will ultimately force the emerging legal cannabis industry to move elsewhere in search of a reliable workforce, and about why smart growers are getting out of the business now, while the getting is good. One commenter at LoCO, who has since deleted his comment, said he was getting out of the marijuana business, and lamented that after 20 years in the cannabis industry, he had little to show for his efforts. Another commenter expressed shock and wonder that someone could work in the black market marijuana industry for so long without making more money. This commenter obviously had no experience in the marijuana industry.

The truth is, most people who try to make a career of growing marijuana, fare poorly. Growing pot is more like gambling in a casino than working a job. Legal businesses rely heavily on a stable legal system that supports their activity. From criminal penalties for shoplifting to a court system that upholds and enforces contracts, legal businesses only remain reliably profitable, because the threat of government enforcement keeps everyone honest. The black market marijuana industry enjoys no such support, and is made, largely, of people who specialize in evading law enforcement. No one plays by the rules, treachery, deceit and thievery are common, and violence is trump.

Some people hit the jackpot in casinos, but most end up losing money, or at best, breaking even. The same is true of the marijuana industry. It may seem counter-intuitive, but the same marijuana industry that brings so much money into Humboldt County, also produces unbearable poverty for far too many of the people who work in that industry. There are no stable, good paying jobs in the marijuana industry. Instead, people gamble with their lives.

Here’s something that happens every day, all day, all over the country. It happened recently to a couple of young friends of mine. They got invited to come out here to work on a pot farm, and to trim the weed at harvest time. They both put in a lot of hard work in the hot sun all Summer, weeks and weeks of 16 hour workdays spent trimming weed, and many cold November nights sleeping in soggy dome tents in the rain. By the end of last year, they had saved a good chunk of money, but they knew they could make even more, if they used the money they earned here, to buy marijuana at Humboldt County prices, take it home with them, and sell it at the prevailing price there.

Unfortunately, they got pulled-over by a cop in a state with less progressive marijuana laws. The cop arrested them, confiscated their weed, and took their money. They spent a week in jail, had to have their parents bail them out, and hired a lawyer. Not only did they lose a year of their lives and everything they earned, they still have to pay hefty fines, legal fees, and spend a year or more on probation, at least.

For a while last winter, in their scissor delirium, they thought they were doing pretty well. They went out to dinner once or twice at the Benbow Inn, bought some expensive scotch at the Redway liquor store, and donated money to KMUD. Now they’re broke, in debt, and have a criminal record. This year they’re back to try again, but they are worse off than when they started.

Something like that story has happened to almost a million people every year, for almost 50 years now, including about 800,000 last year alone. Just because the marijuana industry brings a lot of money here, that doesn’t mean that most of the people in this industry do well at it. Some do, but a whole lot more have the perception that they are doing well, for a short period of time, just like gamblers in a casino, and that feeling makes gambling, and the marijuana industry, addictive.

CAMP raids ruined a lot of people’s lives, for decades, even if they never got arrested. If you managed to put together a good year or two, and used the money to put a down-payment on a piece of property, build a house and put in a grow, you probably thought you were doing pretty well. Then, just as your plants approached maturity, helicopters showed up and CAMP smashed your whole operation. As a result of the raid, you lost a whole year’s income. Because you didn’t have the income, you missed your land payment, so you lost your land, the big down-payment you made, all of the annual balloon payments you made before they busted you, and the house you just built. This has happened to hundreds of people here in Humboldt County. Some people have sold the same piece of land, four or five times, to four or five different ambitious young growers, and gotten higher prices each time they sold it because of improvements made by each successive alleged “new owner” before foreclosure.

Cops aren’t the only hazard in this business. Mold, woodrats, mites, deer, elk, gophers and ripoffs can all ruin a crop almost as fast as CAMP. Then there’s fire. Lots of people lose their crop in wildland fires. If the plants themselves don’t burn, they might die because no one could get into the evacuation zone to water them.

One friend of mine was doing pretty well. He had acquired land and was building a house. At harvest time, he used the unfinished house as a drying shed for his crop. While drying, some of the weed fell onto a portable propane heater which started a fire that consumed the crop and burned the house to the ground. It devastated him.

Nobody has insurance in this business, and setbacks like this can take years to recover from, if they don’t crush your spirit completely. Some people never recover from setbacks like these. Instead, they fall into alcoholism and/or hard-drug addiction, which become setbacks themselves, which lead to more setbacks. After a few such setbacks, most people are pretty well screwed.

Damn near everyone in Humboldt, it seems, is on probation, parole, or has a felony conviction in their past, and our drug addiction rates are through the roof. Far from making us more prosperous as a community, the marijuana industry has become a trap that produces gross income inequity, devastates the natural environment, and unleashes an epidemic of economic refugees while it makes us feel ever more dependent upon it.

Yes, the black market marijuana industry accounts for a lot of the money that comes into Humboldt County but it also accounts for a lot of the homelessness, poverty and drug addiction we find here too. Like a casino, the War on Drugs makes a few lucky people rich, while it swindles the rest of us with games of chance where the odds are stacked against us, and like a casino, it doesn’t really produce anything, except poverty, social problems, and money. Would you care to place a bet on the future of Humboldt County?

Some people say that legalizing cannabis will ruin our local economy here in Humboldt County. I think it’s too late for that. The War on Drugs has already done it. Not only has it ruined our economy, it has ruined our community. All of the serious problems we face, or refuse to face, as a community result from economic forces set in motion by the War on Drugs.

You can see it any day of the week in Garberville. You see lots of poor people, and the contempt for them is palpable. Merchants mostly cater to tourists or dope yuppies. Few pay a living wage, fewer still offer benefits like health insurance, so few people work regular jobs in town.

Local non-profits exploit the poor even more than the businesses. They rely on the unpaid efforts of hundreds of idealistic volunteers with limited economic opportunities. These volunteers happily work a four hour shift, or more, for a T-shirt and a meal, or less, even though they have no safe place to sleep, can’t afford one, and the people who they volunteer to help, would call the cops on them any other day of the week, just for being poor in public. The dope yuppies point to the non-profits as evidence of the generosity of cannabis growers, but the non-profits mainly serve the interests of the growers, while they ignore the needs of their volunteers, let alone the rest of the community.

Dope yuppies, on the other hand, exploit people much more directly, and with much more coercion. They rely heavily on taxpayer subsidized violence, both to inflate the price of their product, and to insure that they have an endless supply of cheap labor. Mandatory drug screening disqualifies most pot smokers from pretty much every field except drug dealing and the arts. If you’ve been busted, you’re doubly screwed. Who else would “hire” someone convicted of a drug felony?

I say “hire” in quotations, because dope yuppies rarely pay people for their time and trouble. Instead, they take on “sharecroppers;” people who do all of the work, and take all of the risk, for a share of the crop, which they then have to sell, along with the dope yuppie’s share, before they get paid. Or they “hire” house-sitters. Dope yuppies think that house-sitting is it’s own reward. They expect people to watch their property, do their chores and take care of their menagerie of pets, while they jet off to Belize, just for the privilege of staying in their home while they are away.

Dope yuppies want people to be that desperate. Just watch how shocked and disappointed they become if you turn them down. It’s not enough for them to have plenty of money. They know that they are only rich, so long as they can bend the poor people around them to their will. They like economic inequity That’s why they vacation in Central America. They don’t wish you well. Don’t forget that.

So, the non-profits need volunteers. The merchants need serfs and the dope yuppies want slaves. The non-profits have their mission statements. The merchants just want to make money, and the dope yuppies want people to do their work for them. None of them care about the people they exploit. Then they have the nerve to complain that most people would rather live on the street and shit on the sidewalk than work for any of them. Who can blame people for opting out? Just because you have three shitty offers, doesn’t mean you have to make a deal.

No one likes it. People hate the whole situation so much they voted to increase taxes to pay for more police. How bad do things have to get before drug-dealers demand more cops? So now the whole sad, ugly mess is crawling with cops. That’s what the cannabis economy looks like in Garberville: punk-ass kids in in brand new trucks, poor people with no good options and nowhere to go, and a bunch of cops just looking for trouble. Lovely, isn’t it?

Who cares how much money is involved, if that’s what it looks like on the ground? Just because the War on Drugs brings a lot of money into Southern Humboldt, that doesn’t mean it makes life better here. Quite the contrary. Look around, SoHum. Look at what the cannabis economy has done to your community.

It takes millions of dollars to cultivate this level of social dysfunction. It takes big money to create the kind of poverty you see wandering the streets of Garberville. All over the country the War on Drugs has turned vibrant communities like, and including, Southern Humboldt into drug ghettos, to feed the insatiable greed of Drug War profiteers. You’d have to be a fool or a cad to want it to continue.

We love the cannabis economy!

Therein lies the true heart of our real economic problem. For more than 30 years, the War on Drugs has made Southern Humboldt extremely attractive to cads and fools. Fools don’t understand; cads don’t care. Both of them measure everything in dollars and cents, either because they fail to comprehend, or they fail to care about, anything else.

Think about it. What would we lose if this county never saw another dollar of pot money? First we’d lose the cads. They know they can’t compete on a level playing field, so they will jump ship first, on their way to the next big scam. They’ll make a lot of noise before they go, but we’ll be better off without them. The fools won’t know what hit them, but they’ll get used to whatever comes next.

We’d lose our housing shortage, as property owners realized that they better find a new way to make money from all of the residential floor space they own. They’ll begin, for the very first time, to rent it to people to live in. What a novel idea! Others will simply liquidate their Humboldt County holdings, creating opportunities for nicer people who just want to live in the forest.

We’d lose the illegal water diversions,

the clearcuts,

and the illegal grading,

not to mention the rat poison,

Humboldt County Sheriff Mike Downey examines California fisher who died from ingesting rat poison set out by cannabis farmers

the fertilizer runoff,

and all of the garbage they leave in the forest,

as people realize that there’s no point in growing more weed than you can smoke.

We’d probably lose 5 or 6 murders each year, not to mention countless other violent crimes, ranging from home invasion robbery to kidnapping and rape. We’d lose CAMP. We’d lose the helicopters, the law-enforcement convoys, and the raids. We’d lose the lawyers. Would anyone miss them?

We’d lose the soil trucks and the water trucks and all of the damage they do to our roads. We’d lose the endless parade of brand new giant pickup trucks. I miss the rusty old ranch wagons, don’t you? And of course, we’d lose the money, but most of us don’t see much of it anyway. The main thing that pot money does for most of us, is make it harder to afford a home, and allow local merchant to focus on meeting the needs of people with more money than us, rather than us.

When you add it all up, it amounts to a hell of a lot of money that this community would have been better off without. It’s high time we said “good riddance” to the cannabis economy. Instead of worrying about the inflated incomes of the greedy bottom-feeders who ruined our economy, lets work on making this community a better place to live for the people who have been hurt most by them, namely, the poor and working people of Humboldt County.

What People Say:

If you haven't read john hardin's blog before, prepare to be shocked. I always am. (I can't help but enjoy it though...at least when I'm not slapping my hands on my computer desk and yelling at him.) He's sort of a local Jon Stewart only his writing hurts more because it is so close to people and places I love. Kym Kemp
...about, On The Money, The Collapsing Middle Class
... I think he really nails it, the middle class is devolving back into the working class. Pretty brilliant, IMO. Juliet Buck, Vermont Commons http://www.vtcommons.org/blog/middle-class-or-first-world-subsistence
BLOGS WE WATCH: John Hardin’s humorous, inappropriate, and sometimes antisocial SoHum blog is a one-of-a-kind feast or famine breadline banquet telling it like it is—or at least how it is through Mr. Hardin’s uniquely original point of view with some off-the-wall poetic licensing and colorful pics tossed in for good measure. For example, how it all went from this to that and how it all came about like the hokey pokey with your right foot out. You get the idea. Caution: this isn’t for everybody, especially those without a bawdy, bawdry, and tacky sense of humor. You know who you are. We liked it. (From the Humboldt Sentinel http://humboldtsentinel.com/2011/12/16/weekly-roundup-for-december-16-2011/)